Environment in COVID-19 Humanitarian Response in Latin America and the Caribbean: Articulating Social and Environmental Policy for post-COVID-19 Recovery - Policy Brief

The Latin America and the Caribbean region has a large caseload of refugees, migrants and internally displaced people as well as slum-dwellers and the urban poor, who are some of the most vulnerable groups and disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis. They are more vulnerable to the virus due to existing morbidity, greater exposure to air pollution, overcrowded homes, the predominance of informal work and poor environmental health. Failure to engage with the response phase of the emergency would mean that the environmental damage from a response which does not consider environmental impacts would already have been done. Failure by humanitarian actors to address the environmental dimensions of the situation and the response would be against the principle of Do No Harm. This paper attempts to contextualise UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) programme and policy options in the shorter-term humanitarian phases of the emergency to the reality of the region.